Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [76]
‘He’s changing into one of those things,’ Tegan shouted. ‘He might not look like it yet, but he is.’
‘As are we all, Miss Jovanka,’ replied the Brigadier, then turned to Yates with a cold smile. ‘Except for you, Captain, of course.’
Suddenly he pressed his gun barrel against Mike Yates’s temple. ‘I suggest the best thing would be to hand the Doctor over to us,’ he hissed.
For a moment Yates looked almost comically incredulous.
Then an expression of sad resignation appeared on his face and he said, ‘You know I can’t do that, sir.’
‘You have no choice, Captain Yates,’ the Brigadier said briskly. ‘You can’t fight us. You are the only true human left here. We are all Xaranti.’
At that moment something slammed into the Brigadier’s back, expelling the air from his lungs and knocking him to the ground with such force that he cracked his forehead on the concrete. A weight landed on his back and a voice muttered, ‘Not yet we’re not.’
The Brigadier didn’t realise he was still holding his gun until it was twisted from his grip. The voice, which the Brigadier quickly recognised as belonging to Sergeant Benton, said, ‘Sorry about this, sir, but it’s for your own good. We can’t let them take the Doctor.’ Pinning the Brigadier’s arms and legs to the floor, Benton lifted his head and spoke to Yates. ‘Get in the truck and go, sir. Take the Doctor with you. Take him somewhere safe.’
Yates’s voice: ‘I can’t just leave you all.’
‘Yes you can, sir. The Brigadier’s right. Soon we’ll all be changing into these bloody things. And then it’ll be too late.
Just go, sir. Go now.’
A pause, then Yates said, ‘We’ll never get through.’
‘Yes you will, sir.’ Benton raised his voice. ‘listen to me, men. Captain Yates is our last chance. If he doesn’t get out of here with the Doctor, we’re finished. Do you get me? We’ll all end up like these poor sods, and eventually like that... that thing in there. So if anyone or anything tries to stop the Captain from getting through, I want you to shoot them. You hear me? If you don’t we’ll all be dead anyway.’
There was a rumble of assent from the men, the Xaranti aggression within them lending the sound an eagerness, an excitement at the prospect of killing. But as the Brigadier, still pinned face-down on the ground, heard the truck’s engine start up, he knew that the Xaranti would not attack.
The Doctor might be escaping now, but already Xaranti energy from the sting was surging through his body, attacking his cells. Soon the Doctor would succumb, and the meagre threat that he posed would be at an end. There was no escape for any of them.
It was evident that the Xaranti felt their influence was now well-established enough for them to have no further need for secrecy. In the half-hour or so since the Brigadier had picked up the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough in his car, Tayborough Sands had dissolved into chaos. The seafront streets may have been cleared in the wake of the Xaranti attack on the beach, but there had still been a great many infected, transforming humans holed up in hotel rooms, boarding-houses and B&Bs. As if responding to some internal signal, these hybrids had now emerged and were roaming the streets in groups of anything from three to thirty, hunting down, infecting or killing the minority of unaffected humans who had been foolish enough to venture back out into the open.
Turlough’s hope that his nightmare had ended with his escape from the fun-fair was short-lived. As he drove back to the hotel, unable to think of anywhere else to go, the delayed shock of his narrow escape from the fairground was further intensified by the sights around him. There were bodies lying in pools of blood, crashed cars, and even makeshift roadblocks, constructed of anything that the hybrids had been able to get their hands on - furniture, chunks of timber, electrical equipment. Though there was barely any traffic on the roads, discouraged by the diversions presumably set up by the army or the police to prevent people heading into town, several vehicles had still come to grief at these obstructions, including